Crossing the Atlantic, With Minimal Effort

It wasn’t long ago that few of us knew anything about Estonian music. Then, in 1993, an ECM Records disc of Arvo Part’s “Tabula Rasa” came out, and we watched with amazement as it climbed the Billboard charts.

Something about this music--like that of Polish composer Henryk Gorecki--struck a new but universal chord. Subsequently, it was dubbed “Holy Minimalism.”

The artists on the Part disc were the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Tallinn Chamber Orchestra. Together with the Hilliard Ensemble, they will play a program of contemporary, mostly Estonian, music Tuesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. The concert, led by Tonu Kaljuste, is sponsored by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County.

“There are two different sides to our music,” Kaljuste said in a recent phone interview from Tallinn, the country’s capital. “One, you could say, is from the earth. The other is in the sky.”

Representing each is Part and Veljo Tormis, who writes in the old tradition of runic song.

“Tormis taught me to understand the mother language of music in my country,” Kaljuste said. “It’s quite important to have some connection with our old folklore and culture, which is quite old, with pre-Christian runic songs, 1,000 years old, more maybe. Tormis didn’t make arrangements. He didn’t use folklore. Folklore used him.

“Arvo Part makes absolutely different music, but the focus of his music is the same. He wants to make--how to say it?--he wants to [make] music from the inside, not the outside.”

The connections between the two aren’t surprising.

“They are living in a small country,” the conductor said. “Of course, they are more connected than in other places. There is a chemistry.”

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Born in Tallinn, Kaljuste, 44, shares the chemistry. He grew up in a musical household. His father was a music professor and a conductor of a local children’s choir in which Kaljuste and his younger sister, now a designer, both sang. When his father, who had formed the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir as an amateur group in 1966, stepped down in 1974, Kaljuste took over. But not before passing through a rock phase.

“I had a band like Emerson, Lake and Palmer,” he said.

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He turned the choir into a professional one in 1981 by securing government support. The group made its first American tour in 1990, stopping at Cal State Northridge to reciprocate a 1988 visit by the university’s Northridge Singers.

Among the Estonian composers on Kaljuste’s program Tuesday is Erkki-Sven Tuur, whose music is just beginning to be heard in this country through an ECM New Series CD. Kaljuste will conduct three Tuur pieces, “Passion” and “Illusion” (both for strings) and “Inquietude de fini” (for mixed choir and strings).

Their collaboration began when Tuur was still writing for his progressive rock band, In Spe (In Hope). “We sang in one concert with him,” Kaljuste said. “It was First Mass, for rock band and my choir. Later, he reorchestrated it for symphony orchestra, ‘Lumen et Cantus’ Mass in 1989.” (It was one of the works for which Tuur has received four of his country’s annual music prizes.)

“Every conductor is a servant of the composer, and every composer gives something very special to a conductor,” Kaljuste said. But the composers don’t make it easy.

“With Part, you must find your own sound. His notation is not very exact. You have many ways you can choose articulations, for instance. At the same time, the orchestra must play in a special way, particularly the strings. They do not play with a very romantic vibrato. Of course, vibrato is one color, but it is not sempre vibrato.”

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In fact, Kaljuste has heard criticism about his performances differing from each other and from the score. “In every concert, you can find different things,” he said. “It never happens to be exactly the same way. It is different maybe because the room is different and you must take other tempos. That is true for the singers as well. Some harmonies can’t sound [proper] when there’s a wrong vibrato.”

Tuur, Part and Tormis, among others, constitute an Estonian “school” of composition, whose unity may be endangered by the availability of opportunities after the country’s political liberation. But Kaljuste believes an essential element will always remain.

“Now it’s a free country and everybody has absolutely different ways,” he said. “You know our history. It was very personal. I can’t talk about how people in Estonia feel. I can talk only about how I feel. Today, everybody works in different places and in different parts of the world. At the same time, with all this chemistry, what anyone learns in Estonia, you don’t leave it. You can’t leave your mother language and what you listen to in childhood. You can’t forget all these things.”

* Tonu Kaljuste will conduct the Hilliard Ensemble, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra in music by Knut Nystedt, Arvo Part and Erkki-Sven Tuur at 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. $25 to $38. (714) 854-4646.